Holy shit. I can't believe what I'm watching here. It's like dinner theater-grade Dickens mixed with watching your friend's deeply embarrassing cover band blended with public-service messages about home safety and doused liberally with powerful hallucinogens. Oh, and there's some Jags driven through all the mess.
(Disclaimer: I wrote this sort of stream-of-consciousness as I watched the event. The event is basically over now, and you may be able to find an archive of it online. Don't.)
Can you feel embarrassed for an entire company? Because that's exactly what's happening here. And this hurts because I genuinely like Jaguar and their cars, and their designers — that's not the issue here at all. It's that launch-play-musical-whatever fever dream is still — still — going on, with no end in sight.
Since I'm stupid enough to be still watching this elaborately-coreographed train wreck, I may as well describe it to you, so you can suffer with me. Here's the basic premise, as far as I can tell: a group of zany teens from 1971 are time-travelling, via some painful friend-of-your-dad's class rock and roll wailing and a giant screen. The teens are led by some shaggy haired guy who loves drawing cars, an embarrassing Indian stereotype, some other guy, and a girl they picked up in the 1930s.
They're supposed to be designing a new car, and they're going through time, loudly and hammily going nuts over all the vintage Jags they see. It's painful. So painful.
There's lots of choreographed dancing and singing and terrible jokes that fall flat and it goes on and on and fucking on. I think I'm actually missing the pointless interpretive dancing that launched this whole mess.
Who's idea was this? Who, exactly would this be targeted at? Does Jag think there's a massive untapped market of lovers of both community theater and needle drugs that they can sell new XEs to?
They just asked the audience directly if this was the best launch they'd seen or something. The audience has been deafeningly silent throughout most of this. and then they're stalling, and now another band. How much longer is this going to go on?
We've already seen the car. We know the specs. Is Jaguar punishing us?
Now I'm feeling bad for all the spouses and partners of these people, who are going to have to smile and nod and tell them that they loved it. They're in the audience right now, desperately trying to find one little detail they can point to and say how amazing it was.
"The lighting was phenomenal!" "Those dance numbers were so elaborate!" The safe bet will be "Those old Jags were lovely."
Jeezis. What a train wreck. End. End, already. Bring out the damn car and put us out of our misery.
Holy shit. They're still going. Did anyone sit through an entire practice run of this? Now they're talking about how there's no "formula for passion" or some shit like that. Puuuuuke.
Now the main kid's dead dad is back. It's turning into some goofball Hallmark shit now. That's it. That's fucking it.
I'm taking 10 points off our Jag review for every memory of this I have to endure.
Update: Here's the whole thing, if you feel like testing your sanity. TIIIIIIIIME TRAVEEEEELLLLLL!